Home | FEMA.gov



Urban Search and RescueHost: Mark PetersonGuest: Evan SchumannMark Peterson:00:02I'm Mark Peterson and this is the FEMA Podcast.Mark Peterson:00:12The FEMA Urban Search and Rescue program is a framework for structuring local emergency personnel into integrated federal disaster response forces. These highly trained and specialized task forces, complete with the necessary tools and equipment and specialized training and skills, are deployed by FEMA in times of disaster. Urban Search and Rescue is considered a multi-hazard discipline as it may be needed for a variety of emergencies or disasters, including earthquakes or hurricanes, typhoons, storms, tornadoes, floods, dam failures, technological accidents, terrorist activities, and hazardous materials release.Mark Peterson:00:51On this episode we have the unique opportunity to talk with Evan Schumann, who is a program manager for Ohio Task Force One, one of the 28 teams in the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue system, about how these teams support disaster response operations in their home communities as well as around the nation.Mark Peterson:01:14One of the programs that FEMA runs is the Urban Search and Rescue program. And they are one of the programs within FEMA that we don't often see because they're not co-located with us. But today we have Evan Schumann from Ohio Task Force One, one of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams (USAR teams). Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.Evan Schumann:01:36Mark, it is my pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.Mark Peterson:01:39Urban Search and Rescue teams are critical to complicated responses but they also serve the communities that they're in, so they have so bit of a unique mission. I'm excited to talk about that, but you can't really talk about the specifics of what the Urban Search and Rescue teams do without talking about the response system that supports them. So, can you tell me a little bit about what FEMA’s national USAR system, why it was created and, and what it serves to do?Evan Schumann:02:11Okay. So the Urban Search and Rescue system that FEMA supports across the country is part of the response side of FEMA’s mission. And we are 28 task forces that FEMA has as a partnership between the states that the task force is located in, the agency that is the sponsoring agency of that task force and FEMA and their 10 FEMA regions. We were created in the early nineties - ‘89, 1990 following the Loma Prieta earthquake. FEMA reached out to the nation and said if we ever have large disasters like this again, we need to be able to support our states in their time of need for search and rescue. We now know that as Emergency Support Function Nine under the National Response Framework and FEMA and three other federal agencies are the primary agencies for ESF-9. However, FEMA had the wisdom or the good idea back in the early nineties, that rather than making this a federal capability with the associated expense of the nearly 6,000 people that make up the national USAR system being all federal employees, the associated cost of keeping us in a state of readiness, our requirement is to deploy by ground within four hours of activation to be ready to board an aircraft within six hours of activation.Evan Schumann:03:39There is an immense expense associated with that if these were full time federal employees with full time federal capabilities. So instead they saw the capability out within the states at the local jurisdictions and said, “We just need to partner with them.” And so FEMA brought us all together. They formed the initial 25, three more teams were added later on in the late nineties. And the partnership exists through a memorandum of agreement between the state EMA, the local governmental entity, FEMA and the FEMA region are the signatories to these MOAs.Mark Peterson:04:17And you know, what Urban Search and Rescue teams are we supporting? Are there other specific types that we look at in order to make them part of the FEMA national USAR system? I mean I would think, without knowing much about the USAR teams themselves, I would think that teams that are a part of a jurisdiction that is a large urban area would make sense. Chicago, New York, things like that. But are those the types of teams that make up the FEMA teams?Evan Schumann:04:47Some of them, not all of them. For instance, you mentioned Chicago, which would be MABAS. Illinois’ Task Force One is not one of the 28 teams in the USAR system. However, L.A. County is California Task Force One. Fairfax County, Virginia is Virginia Task Force One, a combination of FDNY and NYPD make up New York Task Force One, the Phoenix Fire Department, Arizona Task Force One. So yes, some of our large metro cities, with either their fire departments or their police departments and in New York's case, the city's Office of Emergency Management, make up the 28 teams across the USAR system.Mark Peterson:05:31So what is the difference between those teams that are not part of the FEMA system versus FEMA teams?Evan Schumann:05:39A difference operationally I couldn't speak to, but the difference here is that when FEMA organized this system, they sent out invitation letters. They had an initial organizational meeting. Teams came and FEMA eventually worked through the process of identifying 25 of those teams to become part of the initial cadre of FEMA task forces. And then, like I said, later on in the 90s, there was a recognition that maybe we needed a few more teams in proximity to the New Madrid seismic zone, the earthquake line under the Mississippi. And so they added three more teams that were more centrally U.S. located. Ohio was one of those teams. We did not become part of the USAR system until 1997, 1998.Mark Peterson:06:26And so how many people generally make up an Urban Search and Rescue team?Evan Schumann:06:31So FEMA requires us to be three deep in all deployable positions. A basic Type One task force configuration is 70 deployable positions and then 10 ground support personnel. So 70 deployment positions times three would be 210 is the authorized staffing for each of the task forces in the USAR system, plus a 10%. That 10% being for people who may not be deployable. There's also the FEMA Incident Support Team. That's the command and control team that exercises command over the task forces when they're deployed. The staffing for the Incident Support Team, FEMA USAR IST also comes from the 28 task forces. So we're authorized some additional personnel. My task force varies in any given year from about 200 to 225 people.Mark Peterson:07:22From numerous jurisdictions and then they come together. Is that how it works?Evan Schumann:07:26So it's not the same for all task forces. So specific to mine. Yes. We have over 70 agencies that provide personnel to my task force. The proper name for those as Participating Agencies in the USAR system. There's only one sponsoring agency. That's the organization that has executed the contract with FEMA. The sponsoring agency receives the funding from FEMA to provide our yearly funding to keep the team deployable. But a Participating Agency, in my case, is the one who supplies personnel to the task force. Some task forces are sufficiently large and their sponsoring agency - again, I point to a say L.A. County that almost all of their personnel come from just the L.A. County Fire Department.Mark Peterson:08:11It's not just the people that we see on TV that are sort of climbing over the rubble. There's support and specialized capabilities on that too, right? Evan Schumann:08:24Correct. So a FEMA team is broken down into six primary teams. We have the Rescue Team and the Search Team. A search team, including the canines that you and I were talking about. Those are probably the people you see when the television is a videoing one of our operations. But like with many organizations, there's a HAZMAT team who is out front and in the lead when we might be responding to say a chemical environment. But mostly they're there to help ensure that the Rescue Team, when they're working down in a confined space, they're monitoring the air to make sure there's enough oxygen and other needs. There's the medical team, who’s first primary mission is to oversee the members on the task force. And then when we encounter somebody in the disaster who needs medical help, than our medical team provides that support. There is the planning team who helps organize all of the behind the scenes stuff.Evan Schumann:09:18They produce the maps, they produce some of the orders that are handed to the Rescue Team to go do their assignments and then there is the Logistics Team, really the unsung heroes of the USAR system. You know - rescue, search, all of those guys who go out into the field and execute the mission. Just like with our military, without a strong logistics element behind them they wouldn't have the resources to be successful. And in the USAR system, though those guys are logistics folks and they are as extraordinary as they are in the military and other organizations.Mark Peterson:09:49And there's also canines.Evan Schumann:09:50Canines attached to part of the Search Teams. So, right. We have two capabilities on in the Search Team. One would be the technical search, search cams, the listening devices that our technical search specialist positions would be utilizing. And then also our Canine Search Specialists, the handlers and their canine. And unique to USAR system, we have not only lie find canines who will be able to work a collapsed building or a debris field from a hurricane storm surge kind of environment. But we also can bring, for the affected jurisdiction, a cadaver capability, a human remains detection capability. So we have dogs that are trained to not only find live individuals, but also the deceased individuals that may be trapped in that building and help the jurisdictions recover those bodies. Because in the end that is almost as important as recovering the live, provides closure to family members. A standard of practices now to try to identify who's missing from your community and to actually find them either by calling relatives to see if they evacuated or to search their house or search the immediate area around so that we bring, as best as we can, complete closure for the authority having jurisdiction.Mark Peterson:11:10So I wanted to see if we could talk through just the process of deploying your team. So if an event were to require the need for Urban Search and Rescue, what is the process by which you would get deployed?Evan Schumann:11:24So federally, the state that is affected by the disaster, the local jurisdiction in that state makes a request to the state Emergency Management Agency saying, “We need additional search and rescue support in this area.” The state EMA, assessing the entire impact of the disaster, will look at the resources within the state first and allocate those resources which is required by law. But in the event that the capability exceeds the resources within the state, then the state EMA would reach out to their FEMA region and request additional search and rescue support from FEMA. And then FEMA would - the region would call FEMA headquarters, which is where the USAR system is run from, and request whatever resources are necessary. Type One team, Type Three team. Maybe they just want some boat capability maybe or waterborne search. We would deploy a water mission ready package or a canine mission ready package. We have those abilities.Mark Peterson:12:31And all that equipment is just pre-staged and ready to go at a moment's notice.Evan Schumann:12:35Like I said, we are required to have from the time FEMA calls me and says, “Evan, we want Ohio Task Force One to go to Florida and help in this hurricane.” I have four hours in which to assemble whatever the appropriate number of people. Type One as an 80 person team. Type Three is about a 45 person team - to assemble all of that and the appropriate equipment and actually be headed down the highway.Mark Peterson:12:58You know, you mentioned a situation where a state may need resources that they have within the state. Recently, there were tornadoes that affected a large area of Ohio including the Dayton area and your team responded to that. Can you tell me about that experience? Evan Schumann:13:17Sure. So actually this was the first deployment of my task force within the state of Ohio. It came the day after Memorial Day. We had four tornadoes in just Montgomery County. One was an EF-4, I think two others were EF-3. So it was a significant impact to our county. But the other real benefit of the Urban Search and Rescue system is because we're not federal employees, we belong to our local jurisdictions. So, in this particular case, we had Ohio Task Force One personnel working within their own fire departments that were affected by this disaster. Or they were part of regional or local response teams, not just Ohio Task Force One. But in the state of Ohio, we have eight homeland security regions. Each has their own collapse search and rescue team. And almost all of them are either led or have a significant number of Ohio Task Force One people on them.Evan Schumann:14:13So for this particular night, we had key task force people in the most affected jurisdictions from those tornadoes. We were quickly - including myself. I was working in the city of Trotwood by midnight for the EF-4 tornado that went through there. We were quickly able to get a good size-up from all of us that were working in the individual jurisdictions and we were able to coordinate with the fire chiefs in those jurisdictions to say, “Hey, come sunup, we're gonna have a heck of a search and rescue mission going here. We are advising you, encouraging you to request these three resources in addition to what's here. If you can do that through your county, EMA to the state, we can get that activated.” And it was a home run. The chiefs made the phone calls. The county EMA director, Montgomery County EMA director, immediately responded to those requests called the state EMA.Evan Schumann:15:10And from about 2:30 when we were working these requests, by seven o'clock the next morning, we had two of the other regional strike teams from Franklin County and Hamilton, that would be Columbus in the Cincinnati area, plus a Type Three activation of my task force and the Region Three team, which is in Montgomery County. We were all in place come sunup at 0700 and were able to execute a day's worth of search and rescue missions at the direction of those fire chiefs from those communities. And by the end of the day, I don't have the exact figures, but I know we had cleared over 1600 homes. We had helped about 50 or 60 citizens that weren't so much as trapped, but maybe just hadn't seen anybody, you know, by 10, 11 o'clock that morning yet. The communities were still getting going. We helped with some needs that might've been just water. We were able to help some folks recover a pet or something from their house, but mostly what we really did is help the fire chiefs have a strong sense of confidence that by five o'clock that day, the worst parts of their community had actually had somebody physically visit those areas, perform a quality level search so that there was a strong - can't guarantee that you can't do that in search and rescue - but a strong confidence that anybody who needed help or that was trapped, would have been found.Mark Peterson:16:41You know, that's a great example of a deployment within a state. But what about when you're deployed out of state? What are some of the disasters that you've been deployed to recently?Evan Schumann:16:52Personally I was down in Florida for Hurricane Michael last year. I was in North Carolina for Hurricane Florence. In ‘16, I spent two weeks with Region Two for Hurricanes Maria and Irma back in ’17. My task force was deployed to all of those events also. And honestly, the magnitude of the disasters the last three or four years has seen almost a hundred percent activation of the 28 task forces for much of the last three years in support of disasters.Mark Peterson:17:25And when you land in the area that you're going to be operating in, what is the first thing that you're looking to do?Evan Schumann:17:34So, as a task force we don't ever freelance or show up unrequested. So we're either activated at the request of a FEMA region as preparation of resources to be closeby should of their states request ESF-9 support. So you all do that under your surge accounts. When a state makes a formal request, fills out the resource request form and sends it to the FEMA region, then we become contractually turned over to that state. And we take our orders from the authority-having jurisdiction. So as an example, for Hurricane Michael in Florida last year, the state of Florida activated their gold Incident Management Team and that team was charged by the state of Florida to oversee the search and rescue response in the affected area. Our Incident Support Team then worked in conjunction and took their orders from the gold Incident Management Team and then they issued the assignments that the gold Incident Management Team wanted the USAR teams to do. We're not the only search and rescue in these environments. There's of course EMAC. Florida is a robust state with many search and rescue capabilities, including two FEMA teams. So we work at the direction of the authority-having jurisdiction.Mark Peterson:18:56So in that authority might sort of tell you this is the area and the tasks that we need you to do is to clear a residential area. Is that right? Or an area of commercial buildings, something like that?Evan Schumann:19:09Yeah. Usually based on our size, we might be assigned to a large portion of a large community or we may get the entire community in a more rural environment. But we even have a set of standards for search. We can do hasty or focused searches. So if there's a nursing home that nobody has heard from for 24 hours, we might be asked to send a team specifically there and to confirm that, you know, they're only offline because the telephones are down. Or if there's something worse, we can report back. We can maybe do a primary or a secondary search of a community and we have definitions of what those are and tactics associated with those assignments. And we provide that to the local fire chief so that he has an understanding that when we are complete, here is the probability that we would have found anybody we were looking for. Very important that you can never guarantee to find everybody; that's not how search and rescue works. Even at 9-11, after they had delayered the entire World Trade Center and moved it off, you still periodically hear about stories of human remains, skeletal remains being found nearby. So you can't guarantee 100%, but we can get upper eighties, low nineties as a level of confidence for that chief, that if there was somebody out there, we would've found them.Mark Peterson:20:33Yeah. Talk to me about that process of delayering a collapsed structure. Cause it appears from a layman that it seems like a very meticulous process. So why is that task so difficult?Evan Schumann:20:46The quickest way to get to live victims trapped under a collapsed building is to burrow down through the rubble to get to them. But that puts the rescuer in danger. It means we could also inadvertently move something that creates more injury to the trapped individual. Plus after seven or eight days in like an earthquake environment, where there is such widespread damage that we just ran out of days to get to a person who might've been alive after day one or two. But after day eight or nine of have now passed away without water or other medical treatment. It now becomes a recovery and you don't risk a lot to recover, you risk a lot to rescue. And so the delayering now becomes the process of just peeling back the collapsed structure without endangering the rescuers, the crane operators, the people that are doing that in order to be able to recover the victim of the disaster.Mark Peterson:21:47You mentioned cranes, you know. Does heavy machinery get involved or do use heavy machinery in order to do some of this delayering?Evan Schumann:21:56It's one of the 19 positions. We call it a Heavy Equipment Rescue Specialist. It's part of the Rescue Team. The HERS guys have their own course in the USAR system and that course involves a lot of crane operations. We don't operate the crane. The operator comes from the company that supplies the crane or the municipality that supplies the crane. But there is a set of hand signals. There is the process of rigging whatever needs to be removed. How to do that. Remember if we're recovering even a deceased person, you want to treat it with respect, you don't want to do more damage. So if there is a piece of concrete or other debris laying on that individual, just yanking it off of them can do extensive damage and that is - well that's wrong. And so there is a process then there's thought that goes into how to move that piece of rubble without doing additional damage even to a deceased victim. And so that is what we teach in this class and how to work with the crane operators to do that.Mark Peterson:23:02It just seems like there must be just an amazing amount of training that is involved. So what is the process? You know, as a team lead, I'm assuming that you're sort of facilitating the need for training amongst all of your personnel. What kind of training is available to the teams and how do you orchestrate that?Evan Schumann:23:20So there's a couple of answers to that. There is - in order to become a deployable member of the national USAR system - you have to meet the standards that are set by FEMA USAR for all of their 28 teams. There is a set of general training requirements that is to some extent computer, mostly computer based. Bloodborne pathogens, HAZMAT refresher, that kind of stuff. Then we also have an enhanced Operations and Contaminated Environment course which teaches the USAR - the new USAR system - person, the specifics of CBRNE.Mark Peterson:23:59Chemical, biological, nuclear…Speaker 1:24:01Radiological and high explosive. The cache and the procedures we use for those types of mostly terrorism associated events. And that gets you through the general training requirements. To be deployable then in one of the 19 positions, you generally have to complete the training program for that position. So there is a Technical Search Specialists course. There's a Canine Search Specialist course. There's a structural collapse course. There's a medical team training course. All of those positions have a position specific course. My task force, that's the final training. We all have general training. We send you to your required physical and if you pass all of that, we send you - you get deployable course and then you become a deployable team member for us. All that's really done is make you a basic level person, right? Now it becomes our job to turn you into the true specialist that your title says you are.Evan Schumann:24:59And so we train and my task force about 14,000 hours a year across all of the task force members. Every one of the teams trains at least six times a year, some train as much as 12 times a year, monthly. That can be a full day of training of whatever the team manager, at least in my task force, says this is what my team needs to train on to get better. Then FEMA USAR tracking all of that, also requires their task forces once every three years to complete an operational exercise of 36 to 72 hours. What the six teams that were done at Muscatatuck back in June for that exercise that we've been talking about. That accomplished that requirement for those six teams. And then there's just the trainings that are beyond that. In order to be a rescue person on your department, you train there too. If funding allows, we send people to specialized stuff. The state of Virginia does a technical rescue challenge every year. They come up with highly imaginative, very challenging technical rescue scenarios. And I'll send a group of 10 to 20 of our rescue personnel down there every year and they get a week long of very specialized in depth, high-end, hardcore rescue training. And they bring those skillsets back to the task force and then pass it onto the rest of the team.Mark Peterson:26:23And then on top of the training, there's also exercises and some can be pretty large scale. And actually one of the reasons why you're here with me today, conducting an After Action from a major exercise that you helped put on at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana. And that was an experience where you were able to work alongside some international teams. I assume that's not run-of-the-mill training. But that must've been a pretty unique experience.Evan Schumann:26:55It was the first time we had done much of everything you just said in the national USAR system. The United States has an immense amount of search and rescue capability within the nation. But even we acknowledged there could be disasters in this country that exceed the capability of the United States to adequately respond to. And again, search and rescue is a very sensitive process. Even if you are trapped in an area where you're not otherwise physically hurt, but you cannot get out. Three, four, five days without water can be a life ending timeframe. And so getting to you becomes very time sensitive. And if we acknowledge there could be a large earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone along the Seattle, Northwestern United States. Specific to the exercise you mentioned, it was an earthquake on the New Madrid seismic zone, a fault line that underlies the Mississippi. Maybe even more catastrophic than a west coast because on this side of the country, we don't always build for large scale earthquakes.Evan Schumann:28:00We don't expect them on the east side of the country. And so in these events, should we overwhelm even the resources in the United States, then leadership has acknowledged we might have to turn to the international community. And there are an additional set of search and rescue teams that are pretty much equivalent to the FEMA task forces in capability and equipment. It's part of the United Nations INSARAG organization. We have two teams in this country that are a part of that, Virginia Task Force One and California Task Force Two. And those teams are coordinated under the U.S. State Department in the United Nations. They're also part of the FEMA USAR system. But we, in this exercise, acknowledged that we might need those outside resources. And so we invited the Canadian who have a network of six teams that they're starting to develop. And in this case also the country of Australia brought over a 60-person team to participate in our exercise.Mark Peterson:29:11The work that you do on these deployments has got to be just grueling. It's gotta be exhausting. Physically exhausting and in a lot of ways probably emotionally exhausting. Right? What is it - how often are you rotated when you're on a deployment? How much rest you get? Downtime?Evan Schumann:29:31So the stated requirements by FEMA for deploying a task force is that our personnel have to be committed for a 16 day deployment. That's an anticipation of a day of travel on each end and 14 days of operation in between. So if the event were to exceed 16 days, then we have mechanisms to either bring a brand new task force in and let the other one go home. Or we can maintain the equipment and just bring in - remember we were three deep, as I said earlier - we could bring in a brand new set of people and replace the ones that have been deployed. So basically the answer to your question is 14 days of operations in a day of travel on each side.Mark Peterson:30:13What are some of the common characteristics of a Urban Search and Rescue team members?Evan Schumann:30:19We are predominantly from the public safety forces within the United States. So mostly fire and police make up our membership, but not exclusively. Our canine handlers, quite often, come from other backgrounds. FEMA task forces deploy on a Type One team with two emergency medicine certified doctors. They of course come from the hospital systems. In some task forces they might also come from the military. If they're close by a military base, some of their doctors might be from the military. Then our FEMA task forces on a Type One also deploy with two civil engineers. Structural engineers who have been to a special training in how to assess and mitigate a collapsed building. Right? Most civil engineers deal with only a building that's static, that's standing there. Our engineers have to deal with a building that's moved, which is not a real good environment for a building. And so we send them to a special course. And they too then are usually, not exclusively, but usually not from the public safety forces, private practice or engineers associated with municipalities. But there are exceptions. The docs and engineers say with New York Task Force One are actually associated with their fire department and EMS departments.Mark Peterson:31:44But you know, more than that, I mean, you have to have a passion for this work. Right? So what motivates the team members?Evan Schumann:31:52Well of course I can't speak for the other near 6,000 folks, but on my task force, my experience with my team members, it's an absolute commitment to servicing their fellow citizens. We don't get just the run-of-the-mill fireman or policeman on a task force. These are the high-end, AAA, strong personality, strong achievers, the leaders for the most part in the system. And so they want to lead. They want to be in these environments. But their commitment isn't to self-satisfy themselves in this respect. It's to actually serve their citizens just like they do in their own departments. It's just another way for them to serve. And I can't tell you the privilege it is to be able to be in charge of an organization with a group of Americans like this. So much of the world sees, maybe, the worst side of us sometimes in this country. The people who staff the USAR teams are the people we really should hold up and say, “This is who Americans are. These are who we are proud of.” I couldn't be more proud to be in the position I am in.Mark Peterson:33:11We welcome your comments and suggestions on this and future episodes. Help us to improve the podcast by rating us and leaving a comment. If you have ideas for future topics, send us an e-mail at fema-podcast@fema.. If you'd like to learn more about this episode or other topics, visit podcast. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download